After being caught in an avalanche while climbing a mountain in Romania, Ken
Jones defied the odds - and severe injuries - by spending four days crawling
and limping to safety

You could understand if Ken Jones never wanted to hear the word ‘avalanche’ again.

In 2003, aged 26 and a politics student at Manchester University, he travelled to Romania in an attempt to climb the remote Moldoveanu Peakby himself. But, close to the summit, he was hit by two avalanches – the second of which broke his leg and shattered his pelvis – and he was forced to limp, crawl and hop 10 miles across uneven terrain to safety, spending three nights and four days in freezing temperatures thinking he would die alone in the snow.

When he arrived at the nearest Transylvanian village he was taken to hospital, where doctors managed to save his leg, though he came close to death again because of severe stomach ulcers caused by the stress of the ordeal (two thirds of his stomach had to be removed). Doctors in Romania and the UK told Jones, who had served as an army paratrooper and in the Special Forces for several years, that he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But he proved the professionals wrong and now, at the age of 37, not only walks normally but is a serious cyclist. He also set up a fitness company that trains people hoping to join elite branches of the army which – as if laughing in the face of his ordeal – he called Avalanche Endurance Events.

Jones, who now lives in a hilltop Tuscan village with his wife and seven-month-old daughter, decided years ago he had a story to tell and this week publishes his bookDarkness Descending, which describes the avalanche, his journey down the mountain and his rehabilitation, all in harrowing detail.

The story, Jones says, was not easy to write and neither is it a light read. “There was a lot of soul-searching,” he says. “It was a bit of an ugly business to be honest. To do that sort of job correctly, you’ve got to be brutally honest with yourself.

“I’d realised after the first draft that I’d tried to put in a bit too much action and made myself look stronger than I was. I knew that if I wanted to do it properly I had to make myself vulnerable - for a man with my military background that was very hard. You get used to bottling that stuff up.”

The story begins as travelogue – a student decides to get away from it all and picks the challenge of climbing a mountain with notoriously unpredictable terrain – but, after the first avalanche, becomes a disaster narrative in the style of Joe Simpson's Touching the Void. Among the descriptions of Jones’s physical endurance – such as the three hours he spent waist-deep in freezing water trying to cross a stream - there are indeed moments of real vulnerability.

“The closest I had to breaking was on the second night after crossing a stream and crawling for another 1500 metres,” he says of one passage in the book. “I collapsed and was ready to crawl up and die. That was the most traumatic moment of the whole experience.”

While the content is gripping, it is Jones’s humour that make the story so readable. Towards the beginning of his descent, he worries that he will miss his flight home and will not be able to go on holiday the following summer if he has to buy a new one. Two days later he starts hallucinating: he sees “a huge, pink, iced Victoria sandwich like my mother used to bake” and hears “the unmistakable voice of Kenneth Williams” narrating the children’s cartoonWillo the Wisp.

There is also the darkly comic moment when he arrives at the nearest, tiny village - “Romania’s the last great wilderness of Europe, they’re untouched by modern civilization to a far greater extent than anyone else” – only to be offered vodka as medicine by the locals. Despite being close to death, as a foreigner he is treated as a celebrity and one of the village girls even tells him through an ad hoc translator that she wants to be his girlfriend.

Jones has become a serious cyclist since recovering from his injuries

After eventually being treated in hospital, a doctor asks him whether he believes in God, because “it is a miracle you are still here. I have never seen anyone with so many injuries still alive.” Then, just when he thinks he is starting to recover, stomach ulcers cause him to collapse again and he is taken back into surgery. Jones overhears his mother, who has flown out to the hospital, asking the anaesthetist whether her son will survive: “I saw the anaesthetist shake her head and mouth, ‘I’m sorry,’ then put her arms round my mother.”

Jones not only survived but also refused to accept doctor’s warnings that injuries to his leg and pelvis would mean he would never lead an active lifestyle again. As he writes in the book, “The old adage of ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’ remains as potent in my civilian life as it did throughout my military career.” After years of effort on his crutches and a chance encounter with the right surgeon, the only physical effects of the ordeal are a curved, “hobbit-like” right foot that is particularly sensitive to cold and a hip replacement that grinds while he is cycling.

Jones hopes Darkeness Descending will provide readers with inspiration - or “that eye of the tiger thing” – whether or not they have an interest in mountaineering. (He also offers some practical tips on how to survive if you are hit by an avalanche: keep moving at all times so you don’t get trapped in snow, and if you do get buried, work out which way is up by dribbling and digging in the opposite direction to which the saliva runs.)

Surprisingly – though perhaps less so considering he named his company after the disaster that almost killed him – the one-time mountaineer has no regrets about deciding to travel to Romania in 2003. “In many ways I see the whole experience as a good thing,” he says. "I’m lucky to have lived through it and learnt about myself; to have been able to take such a good, honest, long hard look at myself.”

Darkness Descending by Ken Jones is published by Quercus on January 16th and is available as an ebook for £9.99